Throughout a career in visual effects, beginning in sculpture, moving through commercial work to overseeing effects work for feature films, Jon Campfens has accumulated much knowledge, and now there’s one more thing he knows for sure: Germans love David Hasselhoff.

‘He’s the number one singer in Germany, did you know that?’ asks Campfens. While no comments were forthcoming on the foibles of Hasselhoff and eyebrow-intensive bathing beauty Kathy Ireland, stars of the Alliance tv movie Gridlock for which Campfens has received a Gemini nomination for visual effects, he did discuss the project and the role of visual effects workers in production today.

Campfens is a freelance visual effects supervisor, overseeing the planning and creation of a project’s visual effects requirements through shops which are technically and creatively cut out for the work. Campfens says he works with any number of producers, and typically, after the satisfactory completion of a project, a producer will call him directly for the next project. Campfens takes much of his work through John Gajdecki Visual Effects, because, he says, ‘as far as I’m concerned they have the best range of things I can use, as far as a model shop and different computer systems.’

Gridlock, from Alliance Communications, was shot on location in New York and Toronto and revolves around a group of bank-robbing villains who attempt to create the film’s eponymous traffic condition in order to best perpetrate their misdeeds, until a cop with an attitude, played by Hasselhoff, steps in.

Campfens was brought on by Alliance to oversee the project’s high-end effects sequences, which involved creating gridlock, location trickery, explosions and daredevil action scenes while protecting Hasselhoff’s valuable, weather-beaten hide and some key New York real estate.

‘We had to create environments and locations that didn’t exist,’ says Campfens. He used Gajdecki’s shop to deliver models and effects as well as Toronto’s Spin Productions. ‘That’s one of the choices I have,’ says Campfens. ‘It’s often impossible for one shop to do everything, so the work is spread out between different houses.’

He says one of the main elements of the plot featured explosions set off on some major New York bridges. Effects entailed shooting background plates of the existing bridges, building models of the bridges to be exploded and compositing the elements together. Campfens also orchestrated a scene which featured the two thespians suspended, ostensibly, several stories off the ground from a window-washing apparatus, much of which was shot with a green screen and composited in.

Gajdecki’s David Axford and Rick Gajdecki worked on models for the project and the compositors were Gajdecki’s Gudrun Heinze, Joel Skeete, Tamara Stone and Claude Theriault, who has since departed the shop. Spin artists Steven Lewis and Marjorie Knight also contributed.

Campfens’ own effects odyssey started out with studies in sculpture at the Ontario College of Art, where late in his career as a student he experienced angst over the financial feasibility of a future as an artist and made efforts to parlay an interest in film into paid employment.

In 1987 he began working for Film Effects on the optical printer and animation stands. After a move to the National Film Board in Montreal and commercial work with Les Productions Pascal Blais, Campfens heeded the siren song of the west, which promised boom times for his kind in Vancouver.

‘When I arrived I found out it was a big lie,’ he says, and tells of a resulting stint with B.C. Lottery in a hands-on role involving a suit, a warehouse, some boxes and a whole lot of lottery tickets.

As he teetered on the brink of a career in boxing, Campfens was called back to the nfb. Eventually he returned to Toronto where he signed on to the first Imax Omnimax animation feature Journey to the Planets from Nelvana’s Bear Spots Animation and then to Gajdecki’s Visual Effects. ‘John gave me a call to take some work for Dark Man ii and iii and from then on I have yet to sleep,’ he says.

The peripatetic effects expert has spent no less than eight months of the past year in hotels, including a recent stay in Hungary for the shooting of the Alliance feature The Hunchback of Notre Dame starring another multitalented personality, Mandy Patinkin.

That shoot entailed the construction of a two-thirds scale model of the Notre Dame cathedral in Hungary and a smaller, high-detail model in Toronto, and Campfens traveled with a scaled-down motion-control system for use on location.

Campfens acknowledges the varying degrees of involvement in a project by an effects shop, but says his role is to see a project through from the beginning to the end. On Hunchback, this meant input on what the effects would be, how to achieve them, presence at the shoot, and supervision of all modelmaking and compositing.

‘Producers aren’t necessarily extremely knowledgeable in visual effects and don’t want to spend a lot of time being concerned about them,’ says Campfens. ‘They want to be able to pass it over and have the end product delivered; I think that’s a trend.’

Campfens says there is another trend toward production studios having their own visual effects supervisors on staff. ‘The big thing for many of the big shows happening on the West Coast like mgm’s Poltergeist is to have in-house visual effects guys who answer directly to producers and who aren’t affiliated with any companies,’ he says. ‘They don’t want to be in a conflict of interest where all the work is going to one place.’

Another, negative, trend he cites is that of large Canadian post facilities, who offer the gamut of services from transfer to post to film processing, extending their reach to visual effects. ‘When that happens, I think things start to be spread quite thinly and I find the thing that is important is no longer the work but who is the lowest bidder,’ he says. ‘In essence, it’s good for the production because they will get their work done at a lower rate, but not necessarily at the best quality.’